Renzo Piano, the architect of some of the world’s biggest museums, including the Centre Pompidou in Paris and New York’s new-look Whitney Museum, has designed what must be his smallest art gallery yet: a 285 sq. m photography pavilion in the south of France. (The distinction of his smallest building goes to the tiny 7.5 sq. m micro-home at the Vitra Campus in Weil am Rhein, Germany.) Sunk into a valley at the 500-acre vineyard and art park Château La Coste, near Aix-en-Provence, the new space has the unusual double function of “displaying art and preserving wine”, according to a press statement. Visitors will enter the semi-buried building through a narrow corridor that opens into a 160 sq. m concrete gallery, flanked on either side by wine cellars. The inaugural exhibition The Sea and the Mirror, a set of eight large seascapes by the Japanese photographer Hiroshi Sugimoto, runs until 3 September.
